I’ve a good deal of blog to be catching up with! but back and looking forward to keeping in touch and seeing what directions we’re all takeing in 2014 .. just posting some new paintings .. all small 30×30 canvases, a still life of sorts, a last years reworked and the owl and the pussy cat (which I hope might turn into a series about nursery rhymes/ fairy tales) You see I’m finding it difficult to stay on one track bouncing about from image to image like a pin ball!

Looking forward to visiting Christine’s gallery on Sundays to experiment with mixing up digital and traditional printing this year

And to add to your list of things to do in 2013, is to invite you to be part of our (Susan, Catherine McCue and me) experimental print making group. Focus will be new techniques combining inkjet prints with traditional methods. Hope you can find the time. And February…a folio show at DL….exciting hey?

Christmas this year will be spend with good friends who are currently inflating the blow-up pool where we will sip Margaritas in the sunshine and then probably need a 7 hour nap and then some more food (including a prawn and tomatillo nachos), and then more napping. A summer Christmas with an NM twist.

Arriving home 3 days before it has cancelled out time for card writing and tinsel twirling but the offcuts of xmas paper and shiny ribbon trapped in the tumbleweeds of dog hair have added a festive feel to home.

The recent travels have allowed lots of time for thoughts about work to come. There are many things I still want to work through with the bottle trees, and for a few years now I’ve been gathering scribbles and photos and disjointed thoughts around the alpine plants of Tasmania, in southern Australia. It was amazing to see some related plants on the subantarctic islands recently (we got as far as 53˚ south), as well as the gigantism of some of the alpine island plants known as megaherbs.

I think I’m just going to have to start scribbling in the New Year and see what comes, as it currently feels related and not. And the amazing sight of 50,000+ penguins has to work it’s way in there somehow. I’m thinking they could be quite beautiful as embossings like the recent bottle tree collagraph embossings.

And somewhere in amongst all that sits the black gesso, the fledgeling skills in woodcut and hectograph, and the urge to stretch up a gigantic canvas. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Australia is a constitutional monarchy. Our figurehead is the British Queen, Elizabeth 2. Many of our countrymen and women would like to see Australia become a Republic. Others enjoy the ‘pomp and ceremony’and history that we share with the ‘Motherland’, as people once called Britain. This, my most recent work, is titled ‘Flora’s Crown’.